It is funny how ideas connect and collide.  Yesterday, Shelley wondered out loud about processes to work on “schooling forward.” I thought all day about her unrelenting ideas.

Do I have an unrelenting feeling of urgency? Do I feel (and do I worry) that learners can not wait for us to do better…to do different?

Do I feel an unrelenting awareness that it has to be me?  Do I ask, over and over again, if not me, who? Is part of the problem that everyone is waiting for someone else to make a move? How do I practice approaching “every learning event as an opportunity to lead and invent, and to develop our learners’ capacities as leaders and inventors …?”

Do I have or am I developing unrelenting partners and co-learners? Am I willing to serve as a first follower? Am I aware of others looking for or volunteering to be co-leaders and co-followers?

Then, I read my mail – the mail delivered to the mailbox at my home.  (I hardly every receive snail mail.) This is what was delivered today:

Our school states that our mission is “to create a community of learners in which each [learner] can acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to achieve his or her unique potential and become a responsible, productive, and compassionate member of the expanding global community.“

_____

So, I wrote the above last night based on Shelley’s post.  I have the unrelenting feeling, drive, and commitment.  I then reread Pat Bassett’s The Innovation Imperative planning to connect ideas.  I don’t know how to impact the world. I don’t know how to turn the world upside down.  I am a willing, motivated, learner.  I need more unrelenting partners and co-learners. I am unwilling to lose sight of the shore alone.

Who do we team with to innovate, to design, to create, to do different? When we feel lost and overwhelmed where do we turn? What signal am I sending out? How do I find the signals of others?

How and with whom do we light up brains, strengthen teams, unleash imaginations, grapple?